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Roger Hill’s Appreciation of Jerry Weist

Well worth reading is Roger Hill’s long reminiscence about Jerry Weist, excerpted on Scoop. Hill and Weist, then teenagers, first met in 1963 at Forry Ackerman’s meet-and-greet in Wichita during his cross-country tour to publicize Famous Monsters. Hill and another local collector later helped Weist start the EC Comics fanzine Squa Tront (which, in case you wonder, is Venusian exclamation in EC science fiction stories meaning “Good Lord!”).

Here’s a sample of Hill’s colorful telling of his friendship with Weist:

Over these many years Jerry became specialized in buying and selling original comic art, science fiction art, comic books, rare paperbacks and pulp magazines, Edgar Rice Burroughs books and collectibles, Arkham House and fantasy books, rare first editions, science fiction movie posters and other related memorabilia. His quarterly eBay auctions were some of the most popular events to surface in the collectibles’ market in recent years. His experience and vast knowledge of the many different fields he specialized in brought him into contact with hundreds of other professional authors, artists, dealers and collectors.

Jerry’s friend Harlan Ellison once said: “The landscape of genuinely reliable reference guides is an ugly, arid junkyard. Mostly lit by the dim bulbs of the amateur, the slovenly, the jumped-up fans stealing from each other’s inept, error-riddled trashbooks. Jerry Weist towers, like the Great Lighthouse of Alexandria, casting a knowledgeable, insightful beacon. He can be trusted because he be so savvy.”